James, The Crab

My friend Jon recently posted a status update (on Facebook) about his daughter's fish dying. Apparently she paid it more attention after death than when it was alive.

For some reason this incident made me think of James, the Hermit Crab that I inherited the first year I taught kindergarten. As it happened, I took over for a teacher that was moving to Austin, TX. She left her hermit crab in my care. That was a huge mistake. I was new to teaching and that crab was the last thing on my mind. I was preoccupied running around trying to plan and teach lessons and get my feet underneath myself. I should have given up then. That was the hardest year ever!

Anyhow, James came into my care, and not having the time to take care of the poor thing, he suffered greatly. One of my kids was assigned to soak his sponge each day so he had water, but no one knew what James ate and I was not briefed before the teacher moved that left him in my incompetent hands. Maybe if I hadn't been so preoccupied with all the things that come along with my first real job, I would have thought to look up the care of hermit crabs on the Internet. But no, poor James starved to death in my classroom. I did sprinkle fish food in his cage, but apparently crabs don't dig fish food because James crawled out of his shell and died.

My kids learned about democracy that year and what it means to vote. We voted how his body should be disposed of...by land or sea. A kindergartners logic is this: "he should be flushed so he goes back to the ocean." How does one argue with that? Poor James was carried very carefully on a paper towel across the hall to a neighboring teacher's classroom. (I didn't have a bathroom in my room.) We disrupted her class to pay our final regards to James and flushed him in his watery grave with hopes he would return to the ocean. Poor James.

I learned a lesson that year...NEVER accept a classroom pet you know nothing about. Stick with fish, they are the safer bet!